I knew that they were poisonous, the berries.
Still, I used them to make soup. They were
the most beautiful shades of yellow, green
and orange, and they popped when you squeezed them
and spilled their sticky juice, their tiny seeds.
I’d stir them into puddle water with handfuls
of ripped green grass, small stones, broken sticks.
Then I’d stir. Stir and chant into the old silver pot,
chant words I imagined had been sung long before.
It was a soup, I knew, that could heal.
A magical soup that could nourish the world
just in the making of it.
Years later I consider what I knew then—
how belief is the most important ingredient.
How all healing begins with a bit of poison.
When you got to, “It was a soup, I knew, that could heal,” I was already pondering that trusty paradox of being healed by what ought to kill us. (Isn’t that the way they say it goes?) And, later, how often it happens that just in the starting to do a thing, that that thing is already done. Just the making of the soup nourishes, heals, the world, even with no one being served it.
Once again you’ve gone deep. Once again bringing us something from the dark fecund underground.
I think it’s similar to the way that the act of writing the poem is more important than the poem itself. So nice you were there for the genesis of the poem! Big hugs to you, Eduardo …